KDE 4 is a deliberate shift away from the norms of desktop environments. After more than 2 years of heavy development, there is a lot to talk about. KDE 4 represents a largely re-written KDE, a port to QT4 (recently made available under GPL3), and sports the new file manager, Dolphin, and the new desktop shell, Plasma. KDE 4 has been designed to be faster and easier on your computer, while introducing many improvements over KDE 3. Greg Martyn will be leading a discussion of new features including the "pillars of KDE": Plasma, Oxygen, Phonon, Solid, Kross, Decibel, and Sonnet. Also included will be a quick introduction to getting involved with KDE development. Many leading Linux distributions have KDE 4 packages or live discs available now or will soon.

Bonus: Thanks to Joe Gaffney, DVDs of the Google KDE 4 Launch Party were distributed at the meeting.

About KDE 4:
KDE 4.0 is an innovative Free Software desktop containing lots of applications for every day use as well as for specific purposes. Plasma is a new desktop shell developed for KDE 4, providing an intuitive interface to interact with the desktop and applications. The Konqueror web browser integrates the web with the desktop. The Dolphin file manager, the Okular document reader and the System Settings control center complete the basic desktop set. KDE is built on the KDE Libraries which provide easy access to resources on the network by means of KIO and advanced visual capabilities through Qt4. Phonon and Solid, which are also part of the KDE Libraries add a multimedia framework and better hardware integration to all KDE applications.

More Information:

• KDE 4 on Wikipedia
• KDE 4.0 Announcement
• Linux.com :: KDE 4 revises the desktop
• Lifehacker Feature: Design Your Own Desktop with KDE 4
• Trolltech’s Qt4 to be licensed under the GPL v3

About Greg Martyn:
Greg Martyn is currently an undergraduate student at Manhattan College. He will be graduating in May 2008 with a BS in Computer Science and minors in Physics and Math.

Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States

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